by Gay Talese
A week later, while attending a reception at the New York Public Library, I met a Times editor, who came over to say that he liked my story about the bridal couple in Selma.
“But why didn’t you people run their picture?” I asked.
“Oh, I’ll tell you sometime,” he said.
“No,” I insisted, “tell me now.”
“Well,” he said, “some negative comment had been made about it at the editors’ meeting by Gerald Boyd.”
“Who’s he?”
“He’s in charge of the Metro staff,” he said, adding that Boyd was a rising young African-American executive in the Times news department, and that it had been Boyd’s lack of enthusiasm for the wedding photos that led his white fellow editors to agree with him.
I would not have pursued the matter further had I not accepted an invitation a few years later to participate in a noonday symposium about the Times’s news coverage, sponsored by the Center for Communication in Manhattan. With me onstage were four other members of the panel; two seats away from me, on the far side of the moderator, was Gerald Boyd. He was a soft-spoken, round-faced gentleman in his forties with a receding hairline, horn-rimmed glasses, and a thin mustache, and he wore a blue blazer with a white shirt and a dark tie knotted tightly under his throat. He was impressively articulate during his opening remarks, speaking softly and authoritatively in an unhurried manner. Toward the end of the program, prior to soliciting questions from the audience, the moderator invited the panelists to query one another; and that is when I turned to Gerald Boyd and asked: “Are you the man who blocked the photo of my Selma wedding story from getting onto the front page of the Times?”
He seemed stunned. There was rustling throughout the audience.
“Yes,” he said finally.
“Why?” I asked in a raised voice.
“It was boring,” he said.
“Boring!” I said.
“To show an integrated couple on the front page wasn’t news,” he explained. “The picture didn’t represent anything new.”
“In Selma?” I asked.
Gerald Boyd turned away from me, and the moderator, perhaps sensing Boyd’s discomfort, changed the subject. Other topics were discussed and debated for the next hour or so, and then, at the conclusion of the program, after shaking hands with the moderator, Gerald Boyd headed directly for the exit.
21
IN LATE OCTOBER OF 1993, WHILE I AND HUNDREDS OF OTHER members of the alumni were gathered at the University of Alabama for the homecoming football game and other weekend festivities, I learned that an eighteen-year-old white female student from Selma had been abducted in her dormitory’s parking lot days earlier by an armed black man, who, after driving her in her car six miles from the campus and then forcing her to the ground in a secluded area off the highway, had raped her.
A seven-paragraph account of this had been published in the Birmingham Post-Herald on the day I had flown into Alabama from New York, on Thursday, October 28. The story was unprominently displayed on an inside page under a quarter-inch headline: UA STUDENT TAKEN FROM PARKING LOT AND RAPED. The article did not mention that the female student was white and a native of Selma, nor did it specify the race of her attacker. In her testimony to the police, however, she did say that the crime had definitely been committed by a black man in his twenties, adding that he was approximately six feet tall and weighed two hundred pounds, and that he had used a handgun in gaining access to her car as she was parking it at about 1:15 a.m., upon returning to her dormitory. After he had driven her away and raped her, she said, he drove her back to the dormitory parking lot, left the car keys on the pavement under the rear bumper, and then disappeared.
The decision not to identify the race of the victim or the rapist in the Post-Herald had been made by the reporter and the desk editor who had written the headline. The two journalists were male and white. The reporter was actually a twenty-year-old journalism student from the University of Alabama, a blue-eyed, blond junior named Sean Kelley, who, in addition to his editorial role on the campus newspaper, The Crimson White, served as the college correspondent for the Post-Herald, which was a position that I had also held during my undergraduate days at Alabama forty years before.
My purpose in returning for the 1993 homecoming weekend was not only to join other old grads at a football game and enjoy their companionship at reunion parties but to participate in the centennial celebration of The Crimson White and speak at a banquet to be attended by past and present members of the staff. Since Sean Kelley wanted to interview me beforehand for a piece he was preparing for the college newspaper, he had met my flight in Birmingham, and, during our hour-long drive together from the airport to the campus in Tuscaloosa, I was able to interview him about how he had covered the rape story in that morning’s Post-Herald.
I began by postulating that the Post-Herald management would have presented the story very differently had the incident occurred when I had been the correspondent. In 1953, instead of being buried inside the paper, it would have appeared on page one and would have revealed, rather than concealed, the fact that it had been an interracial rape, and this disclosure would have probably aroused the anger and fear of white readers in ways similar to what had been experienced in Selma in 1953 during the William Earl Fikes case.
“I won’t argue with you that my story in this morning’s paper was buried,” Kelley said, steering his car along the highway. “But I still think it was properly handled.” It was not a story about race, he insisted; it was a story about rape. He did concede, however, that his news judgment had been guided by his racial sensibility, by his reluctance to “stain the black race by identifying the rapist as a black man.” He said that he took pride in being among the first generation of white southerners who had grown up in a desegregated society. As a boy, he had attended public schools with black youths, had joined them on athletic fields and in movie theaters, and had swum with them in public pools. He had been born in Birmingham in 1973—ten years after Dr. King had written his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”; ten years after two black students, escorted by federal officials, had stridden past a displeased Governor Wallace to enter the University of Alabama—and while Sean Kelley’s parents and grandparents had been forced to conform to changes imposed upon them by outside forces, he himself had no quarrel with his inherited circumstances. The troubled sixties were part of the past. He was part of the present. He had gone out on dates with a black girl in high school. He had many black female and male friends at the University of Alabama. There were black staff members working with him on The Crimson White. Although he acknowledged that a vast majority of his fellow students tended to socialize along racial lines in their private lives—the fraternities and sororities on the campus were either exclusively black or white—the dormitories were fully integrated, and of the school’s nineteen thousand undergraduates, more than two thousand were African-American.
“But what if one of these African-American women on the campus had been raped by a white man from Selma?” I asked. “How would you have reported that?”
“That’s a hypothetical question, and I don’t really know the answer,” he said. After giving it some thought, he said that if it had been a reversed situation—rapist white/victim black—it would probably have sparked a public protest led by black student activists, and this would have undoubtedly drawn outside media attention. He assumed this, he said, because of what he himself had seen during his freshman year on the campus, in 1991. Having heard that some white female students had attended a fraternity house costume party in blackface and had attached basketballs under their skirts to simulate pregnancy, Kelley decided to publish an account of this in The Crimson White. His story was picked up by the Associated Press and wired around the country. A camera crew from CNN soon appeared on the Alabama campus to film the black-led protest rally, which was also joined by several sympathetic white students. Hundreds of demonstrators marched past the Sigma Chi fraternity h
ouse where the costume party had taken place, and someone hurled a brick through one of the building’s windows. The crowd also gathered in front of the offending girls’ Kappa Delta sorority house, shouting words of condemnation up toward the darkened windows and locked doors of the white-columned manor, which was being guarded by a row of police officers.
This had been the first time that Sean Kelley had seen how his journalism could inflame and arouse the passions of other people, and the experience instilled within him a heightened sense of responsibility and even feelings of remorse. In bringing national attention to what he described as the “stupidity” of a few white sorority girls, he had unwittingly resurrected on the UA campus the specter of George Wallace, which was an association that hardly any of Kelley’s contemporaries and elders desired or deserved. The behavior of those girls was not typical of the UA student body, he explained, and yet he had chosen to expose them in print because he sought the acclaim it would possibly bring him as a young investigative reporter. His story appeared on page one of The Crimson White, and it was also a worthy addition to his scrapbook when he applied to the Birmingham Post-Herald for the correspondent’s position, which he obtained in 1992.
But now, as he spoke to me a year later in the car during my homecoming visit, he said that he was no longer entirely sure that he would pursue a career in journalism following his graduation. He knew only that, in his report about the rape in that morning’s Post-Herald, he had been colorblind. He had not wanted to risk stereotyping black people any more than he had wanted to sensationalize the story by revealing that it had been a white woman from Selma who had been preyed upon.
During the days that I remained on the campus, the police had nothing further to say about the rape case. More security guards had been quickly added to the college’s parking lots, and flyers alerting everyone to the occurrence had been posted on dormitory bulletin boards and elsewhere. But in the weeks and months that followed, the identity of the rapist would remain a mystery; and, according to what Sean Kelley would subsequently communicate to me via the mail or during our many exchanges over the telephone, there remained a palpably muted reaction to the rape on the Alabama campus. There were no “take back the night” rallies by white feminists, no interracial discussions initiated by any groups of student leaders, and no follow-up articles in the Alabama press. After having published a short piece in The Crimson White that was similar to what he had done for the Post-Heraldy, Kelley had been told by his editor in Birmingham that no further coverage was necessary. In essence, Kelley said, there was general agreement between the two of them that this was a one-day story.
I was able, with Sean Kelley’s assistance, to arrange an interview with the young Selma woman during one of my later visits to the University of Alabama. She agreed to see me, with the understanding that I would not publish her name, but in our two meetings she basically told me what she had already told the police. She said that she hoped to forget as quickly as possible what had happened to her, and to concentrate on her studies and eventually graduate with a degree in education. Her father had also graduated from the University of Alabama, she said, and having been provided with her parents’ address, I managed to see them when I was next in Selma.
Both her mother and father had been born into prominent old families. Her mother hardly spoke a word to me during our interview, but her father had plenty to say.
“I would have liked to have killed that man for what he did to my daughter,” he said. “And I could have found out who did it, if I’d wanted to,” he went on, indicating that the police were inadequate to the task of tracking down the culprit and rendering justice. “When I heard what had happened, I drove right up there so fast that it’s a wonder I didn’t kill somebody along the way. Oh, I could have sued the university,” he declared, “and if I had done it, I would have won. They were negligent. The university was definitely negligent,” he repeated, citing in particular having inadequate security in the freshman dormitory’s parking lot. “But I had to back away from it. I wanted to get involved, to open up that case and get involved, but I had to back away. I just didn’t want to put all of us through all the publicity and the rest of it.…”
He was speaking to me in his office, which was located within a large framed building that stood along the edge of a gravel road and led to the entrance of what had long been the family’s cotton plantation. Adjacent to this land was the highway that Martin Luther King, Jr., and his civil rights followers had used in 1965 while traveling toward Montgomery.
22
PRIOR TO MY HOMECOMING VISIT TO ALABAMA, I HAD FREQUENTLY been in contact with the newly appointed editor of The New Yorker, Tina Brown, a forty-year-old British-born, Oxford-educated blonde who reminded me of my high school English teacher—a comely, decorous, and demanding taskmistress who was often at the center of my teenage erotic fantasies, and who was the first woman to personify for me the awesome combination of sex appeal and professional power.
In fairness to Tina Brown, I should explain that these dual qualities in her case were accompanied by a well-bred manner and a subtle sense of humor and also the capacity to influence people through a bit of flattery and a directive style that was never so ironclad as to seem unreasonable. I further think that Brown was particularly compelling and seductive when dealing with men of means or other assets who were close to the age of her father, George Hambley Brown, a film producer, whom she adored and who, in turn, stalwartly supported and encouraged her throughout her meteoric rise in the magazine business, beginning in London as the editor of the Tatler when she was twenty-five.
Two years later, in 1981, she married a man who was twenty-five years her senior, the celebrated fifty-two-year-old editor of the London Times, Harold Evans, who, when she first fell in love with him, six years before, had been married for decades to a woman with whom he had three children. Another important man in Tina Brown’s life, and the same age as Harold Evans, was the American media entrepreneur Samuel I. New-house, who would agreeably lose millions of dollars while underwriting her career in New York, first installing her as the editor of Vanity Fair in 1984 and then transferring her in 1992 to The New Yorker. Notwithstanding her lavish spending on editorial production and promotion, and the high fees and liberal expense accounts she extended to her writers, photographers, and other contributors, she actually increased the market value of the Newhouse properties by adding to their name recognition and by tailoring their appeal to increasing numbers of readers and advertisers. She was called the “Queen of Buzz” by Judy Bachrach, author of a biography about Tina Brown and Harold Evans, and the writer and ex-editor of The New Republic, Andrew Sullivan, saw Brown as enthralled with “the crazed cult of contemporaneity,” adding that she was a “woman of her time, acutely in sync with the delirious daydream of the 1990s and the media vanities it fostered and to which many of us fell victim.”
Although she drew much media scrutiny in the United States, as she had earlier in England, her detractors rarely seemed to rattle her to the point of discouragement. “The dogs bark,” she said, “and the caravan moves on.”
I first met her, along with Harold Evans, in New York during the late 1980s at a book party celebrating the latter’s memoir, Good Times, Bad Times, in which, among other things, Evans wrote about his unpleasant experiences with the London Times’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, who had fired him in 1983, a year after Murdoch had become the proprietor. This was less than two years after the Evans-Brown marriage and two years before they would settle in New York—she as the thirty-year-old doyenne at Vanity Fair, and he as a fifty-five-year-old newsroom veteran with a distinguished past and an uncertain future.
But by 1990, he had been selected by S. I. Newhouse to serve as the president and publisher of the Random House trade division, and with her elevation to The New Yorker in 1992, Tina and Harold were generally recognized as the reigning couple in the capital of communications. Nan and I enjoyed attending dinners at the couple’s East Side r
esidence, occasions that brought together individuals from the worlds of entertainment, publishing, fashion, finance, and politics. And one day when I was having lunch with Tina Brown during the summer of 1993, seated next to her at her usual corner table at the Royalton Hotel on West Forty-fourth Street, a short walk away from The New Yorker’s headquarters, I was pleased and honored to hear her express the wish that I become a contractual contributor to her magazine. I could have my own office at The New Yorker, she said, and be identified as the “writer-at-large,” which was the title she had bestowed upon Norman Mailer when he had worked with her at Vanity Fair.
What appealed to me about Brown’s proposal was that it would offer me relief, at least during the one year’s length of the proposed New Yorker contract, from my ridiculous life as a prolific author of unfinished manuscripts. Despite all the time that I had spent in familiarizing myself with such restaurant personalities as Nicola Spagnolo, Elaine Kaufman, and Robert Pascal, and despite my delving deeply into the history of the “Willy Loman” building of bad omens at 206 East 63rd Street—and all my research on the subject of Alabama—I had nothing that I could rightly point to as a book in progress.
I wondered if part of my problem was in choosing to write about people and places that changed little over prolonged periods of time, and about which it was difficult to draw conclusions. What could be concluded, for example, about the complex situation existing in present-day Selma? It was also possible that I was subjecting myself unduly to pondering and procrastinating because I tended to see each and every subject from different angles and varying viewpoints—a prismatic vision that is said to be commonplace among the people of Italy. I once read a historical novel by Peter Nichols about Italy’s Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo, a militant clergyman who was loyal to the Spanish Bourbon monarchy in Naples and led a popular late-eighteenth-century uprising against the invading forces of Napoléon, and one of the book’s characters laments, “We Italians have suffered enough from being able to see too many sides at once.”